Laboratory Accreditation: Getting there is Just the Beginning

This training on laboratory accreditation will focus on ISO/IEC 17025 requirements. Attendees will learn how to develop and maintain a quality management system to ensure compliance with the international laboratory accreditation standard.

Why Should You Attend:

Why do you want to become accredited? Where do you start? For laboratories that are already accredited, how do you ensure staff adherence to regulations and ongoing compliance to minimize corrective actions arising from accreditation audits? Getting there is relatively easy. Staying there is the hard part.

Many laboratories struggle with developing and implementing a functional Quality Management System (QMS) that not only complies with the management and technical requirements of ISO/IEC 17025:2005 but also meets their needs. Once accreditation has been achieved many laboratories have difficulty maintaining the QMS as evidenced by the number of non-conformances cited during the subsequent biannual audits.

This webinar will address not only how to develop a QMS that will affect the day to day operation of the laboratory, but also how to maintain it.

Learning Objectives:

Developing a Quality Management System (QMS) as a prerequisite for getting accredited is relatively easy. Maintaining the QMS to retain your accreditation status is the real challenge and a measure of the robustness your System.

Areas Covered

Defining a Quality Management System (QMS)

Management components of a QMS

Technical components of a QMS

Method selection, validation and verification

Ensuring analytical competency

Ensuring analyst competency

Instructor

Michael Brodsky, has been an Environmental Microbiologist for more than 41 years. Mr. Brodsky is a Past President of the Ontario Food Protection Association and AOAC International.

He serves as Chair for the AOAC Expert Review Committee for Microbiology, as a scientific reviewer in Microbiology for the AOAC OMA and the AOAC Research Institute, as a reviewer for Standard Method for the Examination of Water and as a chapter editor on QA for the Compendium of Methods in Microbiology.

He is also a lead auditor/assessor in microbiology for the Canadian Association for Laboratory Accreditation (CALA) and is a member of the Board of Directors.